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Association: Name: American Political Science Association URL: http://www.apsanet.org
Citation: URL: http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p150498_index.html Direct Link: HTML Code:

Holston, Ryan. "Babbitt's Moral Imagination: Unpacking the Paradox of Creative Imitation" Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Marriott, Loews Philadelphia, and the Pennsylvania Convention Center, Philadelphia, PA, Aug 31, 2006 <Not Available>. 2009-05-24 <http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p150498_index.html>

Holston, R. R. , 2006-08-31 "Babbitt's Moral Imagination: Unpacking the Paradox of Creative Imitation" Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Marriott, Loews Philadelphia, and the Pennsylvania Convention Center, Philadelphia, PA Online <PDF>. 2009-05-24 from http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p150498_index.html

Publication Type: Proceeding Abstract: Since Thomas Hobbes and the religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, political theory has struggled with the consequences of normative fracturing for political order. Contemporary theoretical responses to this distinctively modern predicament have been various. While one prominent strain of liberal thinking has addressed pluralism’s difficulties by attempting to theorize a normatively neutral political order, this appears problematic, in that it ultimately renders equal treatment or tolerance of all conceptions of the good itself a summum bonum. Similarly, radical moral skepticism, in eroding the foundations of moral knowledge, is often rooted in the effort to establish more open and humane modes of political interaction, thus implicating itself in a self-defeating privileging of tolerance as well. Still others argue that rational argument will reveal moral disagreements to be soluble and that convergence is possible on self-evident first principles of justice; however, reason’s investigatory function instead tends to expose intractable differences with respect to the ultimate sources of moral authority. Drawing inspiration from the thinking of Irving Babbitt, this paper argues that in order to comprehend the variety of normative outlooks in society, it is first necessary to develop an appreciation of the aesthetic or imaginative faculty and how it is essential for human beings in making sense of experience and in moral decision-making. Babbitt’s conception of imagination or intuition, itself informed by the insights of Coleridge, breaks radically from classical conceptions which had understood this as a passive activity, consisting merely of sense impressions in the memory and as distinguished from the active power of the intellect. In contrast, imagination for Babbitt is the active, synthetic activity whereby the multiplicity of experience is creatively, intuitively organized such that wholes of experience are primary; heterogeneous flux enters consciousness in a unified, coherent manner. Not only is the aesthetic faculty thus essential for making sense of experience, but it also facilitates action in the world, as implicit in the creative understanding are possibilities of what reality may look like for the human decision-maker. While there is an obvious sense in which Babbitt is indebted to the Romantic tradition for these insights, his thinking is tempered by an awareness that just as a work of art may be aesthetically captivating but become disconnected from reality, so can the imagination in human affairs express either wisdom or fantasy. In apprehending human experience and in decision-making, it is possible for the imagination to be guided by a higher or ethical will, which orients the aesthetic faculty toward participation in the universal moral order. Babbitt’s “moral imagination” is an appreciation for the sense in which moral conduct is thus a creative imitation of the universal. In opposition to classical political rationalism, this creativity implies that the good is unamenable to precepts that attempt to express a priori what such conduct will look like. At the same time, Babbitt’s thinking lends itself to the sanguine notion that within particular circumstances, human beings as such have the capacity to intuit the universal. In attempting to appropriate Babbitt’s thinking to address the difficulties associated with political pluralism, this paper will consist of two parts. First, it will further develop the insights and implications of Babbitt’s conception of the moral imagination, confronting the tension between romantic vision and ethical will, and thus fleshing out the apparent paradox of this “creative imitation” of the universal. Second, it will explore the possibility that despite diverse views on the ordering of the whole, moral imagination may facilitate convergence on questions of justice in the particularity of social and political life. For if the ethical will works to orient the intuition within the particularity of experience, those who share such experiences within a political order may find agreement on the good in the particular even while it evades them in the abstract.

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